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Peter Rukavina on October 6, 2005 - 17:05

On second blush, it looks like the DjVu files aren’t standard — I can’t read them with the DjVu viewer from LizardTech on my Mac, nor will the Zaurus DjView application display them. I’ve emailed New Yorker technical support for more information.

I was so happy to have the DVD at home, but it is not fun swapping the DVD all the time. and the I thought I could host my dvds on a hardisk somewhere, since the dvd is copy-right protected, there is nothing much i can do about it. IF anyone knows how to overcome this problem, give us a shout. cheers.

Yes, you can install the New Yorker DVD magazine collection to yourhard drive or external drive or firewire drive without need to swapDVDs or use mounted virtual drives. Here’s how:

With the original New Yorker magazine DVD installation, the programrequires you to swap DVDs everytime you want to see an issue.That is annoying. Instead, you may want to install all theNew Yorker magazine directly to your hard drive and read offthe hard drive without having to swap DVDs. Since the installprogram does not let you do this, you have to slightly “hack”the New Yorker installation. You could attempt to mount virtualhard drives, one for each DVD, and switch between them throughthe virtual hard drive control panel. But this is tedious. InWindows XP, follow these directions, and you will be able tocopy the New Yorker to an external or firewire drive so thatyou just need to connect the drive to any computer and justinstall the New Yorker from the hard drive to that computer andread off the hard drive:

2) Make a new subdirectory in your newyorkr base directorycalled “Install.” Then, copy the entire contents of theDVD 1 installation directory to the Install sub-directory.Use a program like Karen’s Replicator to do this, sinceWindows sometimes has trouble copying huge multi-gigabytesamounts of data in one shot. The Karen’s Replicator programis available at:

3) Go to the Install directory, and find the Issuessub-directory. Move all the issues files (the .djvufiles) to the Issues sub-directory of the newyorkrmain directory.

4) Also, copy all the issues files from the other 7New Yorker DVDs to the Issues sub-directory of thenewyorkr base directory. This may take a few hoursbecause this is maybe 55 gigs of issues! Use theKaren’s Replicator program for a smoother copyingexperience.

5) Now, edit the database file. Go to the newyorkrbase directory and find the database file, which isny-sqlite-3.db. This is an sqlite database file,which you must edit slightly using an sqlite editor.One such editor is VisualSQLite, available at:

Open up the ny-sqlite-3.db database in the Visual-SQLiteprogram. When you first load up the Visual-SQLite program,you see a window at the bottom left, where you can executecommands. Type the following command in the window andexecute it:

update Issues set DiskID = 9 where DiskID <> 9;

Save the database, if it does not automatically save.This command will change references to DVDs in thedatabase so that it makes the program look for issuesfiles in the Issues sub-directory of the New Yorkerdirectory on the hard drive.

6) Find the ny-sqlite-3.db file in the base directory.Make sure it has today’s date on it, showing thatit was edited.

7) Now, install the New Yorker from your external hard driveto the hard drive of whatever computer you want to installit to. Go to the Install directory and click on WindowsSetupto do so.

8) To make it so that the installation reads the Issues offyour external hard drive, make a change in Regedit.Run Regedit (You can find Regeditby going to the C:\Windows directory and finding Regeditthere, or left-clicking on the Start button, going to Run,and in the Run command box typing Regedit). In Regedit,search for Yorker. This will find several references tothe New Yorker Installation. After pressing F3 a few timesto repeat the search, you will see the word InstallPath.double-click on InstallPath, and change the Install pathdirectory to the base directory on your external hard drive,that is, the base directory containing the Issues sub-directorythat contains all 55 gigs of New Yorker issues. In this case,change it to e:\newyorkr.

You can now run the New Yorker such that it will read theissues directly off your external hard drive. With whateverWindows XP computer you want to install New Yorker to, justhook up your external hard drive to that computer andrepeat steps 7 and 8. No annoying DVD swapping required!Once you change the InstallPath to your external drive basedirectory that contains the edited database, you don’t needthe database in the installation directory where you installedthe New Yorker on your computer. So you can just delete thatdatabase file, which is useful because the database file isa massive 587 megabytes. So if you install the New Yorkerto C:\Program Files\New Yorker Viewer just go there anddelete the ny-sqlite-3.db file. When you run the New Yorker,it will just read the edited database file off the basedirectory of your external hard drive.